Page 62 of A Discovery: Love and Other Things

Thirteen unread texts, eight unanswered calls, and three deletedvoicemails—or at least, I assumed they had been deleted since my calls weren’t being returned.

My fingers hovered over the little phone icon on my screen. I wanted to try one more time. Maybe this would be the lucky attempt that persuaded James to answer.

They said the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I was one more phone call away from eating Tide Pods for dinner.

I tossed the phone aside and stretched out on the bed. It had been three days since The Great Revelation at the site, and I had seen more of my hostel room than I had during the entire trip.

The university had sent me the uncomfortable email I’d been expecting, with choice phrases like “immediate suspension,” “pending an ethics review,” and my all-time favorite, “disciplinary action.” Basically, I wasn’t permitted on-site until the ministry finished their investigation and issued their findings to the university.

I imagined James’s email had been worse. The general tone after James had left the site for good was that he was the one responsible for our indiscretion. Never mind that I’d been a willing participant, most of the team had taken pity on me as if I had been seduced by a predator.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was just as guilty as James. We’d both wanted each other, and I resented being made out into some sort of inferior child who had been taken advantage of. The narrative painted me as a naive girl without a brain to think for herself, which pissed me off. No one had been around when James and I were together to witness our chemistry or to see how he worshipped me. Instead, they had all jumped to the conclusion that I was the victim, and my bet was the ministry would adopt the same tone.

I wished James would talk to me. My gut told me that he wasn’t taking this too well. His entire career, which he had strived for to gain independence from his horrible family, was completely shattered. He was an Egyptologist, and surely, the ministry would never allow him to set foot in the country again.What would Oxford say? Would they fire him?

My head pounded from thinking too hard.

Knock, knock.

“Go away!” I shouted at the door. Angela was the only person I could stand being around, and she would never have knocked before entering.

The door clicked open halfway anyway and Felipe poked his head through. “Can I come in?”

So much for respecting my boundaries. “You’re alreadyin.” I didn’t attempt to hide my sarcasm.

His face was solemn as he entered the room, closing the door on his way. “I brought you something to eat.” He took a seat on Angela’s bed and held out a plate of stuffed zucchinis.

I didn’t move to take it from him or offer a polite thank-you like I normally would have. Instead, I just stared at the ceiling with my arms crossed over my chest.

He put the plate on the side table. “You haven’t been downstairs in days,” he said.

Angela had been bringing me all my meals when the team was at the hostel, and I would go down for lunch when they were all gone. I chose to shower when they were at the dig site so I wouldn’t bump into any of them. I didn’t have anything to say to anyone, especially Felipe.

“You’re still mad at me.” His expression showed disappointment, as if he’d expected a warm reception from me.

All he was getting from me was ice.Ice ice baby. “Did you just come here to state the obvious?”

“Kitty. Please. I came to apologize for losing my temper at the site.”

“You punched him. You punched himin the face.” There was no way I was letting him dilute what he had done with meaningless words.

Felipe sat forward. “He shouldn’t have taken advantage of you. He is...wasyour professor.”

I scoffed aloud. Fuck him for assuming the worst, even though James would most likely be fired.

“He didn’t take advantage of me. I wanted to be with him.”

His holier-than-though expression made me want to throw up. “Yeah, but it was inappropriate. You had to have seen that.”

I rubbed my tired eyes. They were all cried out. To the outside world, a man pushing forty with a twenty-one-year-old student would always seem wrong. People would say that he was with me because he had a Leo DiCaprio complex and that I had daddy issues or that I was a gold digger. I wasn’t going to begin to dive into the daddy-issues theory for fear of permanently fucking up my psyche, but I was no gold digger. “I don’t care. I love him.”

My admission caught Felipe off guard. “You could have any guy you wanted. Why him?” His tone neared irritation.

My mouth twisted. “Why do you care so much?” I didn’t owe him or anyone an explanation.

“I think he’s a shitty guy for risking your reputation like this in public.” The disgust on his face was thick.

Why did he care so much about this? I got that it was shocking to him, to everyone. We were friends, but not best friends, and he was worried way more about myreputationthan Angela was. Something wasn’t adding up.

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